Niall Collins (Limerick County, Fianna Fail)
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115. To ask the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation the details of the latest employment projections for the 2020 to 2025 period at national and regional level for the remaining period of Enterprise 2025. [10823/18]

Heather Humphreys (Cavan-Monaghan, Fine Gael)
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Enterprise 2025 renewed is due to be launched on 9th March. The review of our national enterprise policy was undertaken in the context of recent global developments, including Brexit, international tax policy developments, US policies and the pervasive impact of new and emerging technologies.

The national jobs target set out in Enterprise 2025 was for 2.18 million to be in employment by the end of 2020. This ambition has been achieved and has been updated in the review while the ambition for each NUTS III region remains in place - that is, to ensure that the unemployment rate for each region is no more than one percentage point above the national average. The level of uncertainty and confluence of global drivers of change makes it challenging to forecast beyond the next few years with any degree of confidence.

Between June 2015 and January 2016, my Department published eight Regional Action Plans for Jobs, aimed at raising employment levels in the regions and facilitating them to achieve their economic potential. Each plan contains a series of actions with timelines for delivery between 2015-2017, through improved collaboration between enterprise agencies and other stakeholders supporting enterprise development in the regions. A key objective of each of the plans is to have a further 10 to 15 per cent at work in each region by 2020. The attached table shows our progress towards these employment targets up to Quarter 2 2017.

On 16thJanuary 2018, the Central Statistics Office released the Labour Force Survey for Quarter 3 2018, which has replaced the Quarterly National Household Survey as the official source of data for employment and unemployment in Ireland. The data presented in the report incorporates adjustments to previous releases to take account of revisions to population estimates arising from the 2016 Census of Population. Due to the break in the time-series of regional employment data, comparisons that span Quarter 2 to Quarter 3 2017 cannot be reliably made. As a result, the data presented in the table attached spans Q1 2015 - Q2 2017.

Regional Employment Performance Q1 2015 – Q2 2017 (thousand):

Total Change since Q1 2015

Target: increase of 10 to 15 per cent at work in each region by 2020

Source: Labour Force Survey Quarter 3 2017, CSO.